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I am proud to be a Turk, and to write in Turkish about Turkey - and to have been translated into about 40 languages. But I don't want to politicize things by dramatizing them.

Orhan Pamuk

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Orhan Pamuk
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: June 7
Academic
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
İstanbul
Pamuk
Ferit Orhan Pamuk
Write
Turk
Writing
Turkish
Things
Translated
Turkeys
Turkey
Languages
Proud
Language
Politicize

More quotes by Orhan Pamuk

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With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.
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It may not happen in the first instant, but within ten minutes of meeting a man, a woman has a clear idea of who he is, or at least who he might be for her, and her heart of hearts has already told her whether or not she's going to fall in love with him.
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How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?
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When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.
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In actuality, we don't look for smiles in pictures of bliss, but rather, for the happiness in life itself. Painters know this, but this is preciously what they cannot depict. That's why they substitute the joy of seeing for the joy of life.
Orhan Pamuk
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Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.
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I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.
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The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots the second thing I learned was that some are even worse.
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The real choice we have to make is between peace and nationalism.
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The urbanized life has lead to the destruction of the legends.
Orhan Pamuk
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Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Instanbul, it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.
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I sometimes joke that I am the first writer of historical fiction who can look out his window and point to the objects in his novels. I have a view of the entrance to the Bosporus, the old city, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque.
Orhan Pamuk
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As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them
Orhan Pamuk
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In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.
Orhan Pamuk
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I don't read newspapers in the morning. I take a look at the dailies in the afternoon, but only when I've finished my work for the day. Reading about what is happening in Turkey once again would only be demoralizing for me.
Orhan Pamuk
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I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.
Orhan Pamuk
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Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case it had simply made him less visible.
Orhan Pamuk
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The challenge is to lend conviction even to the voices which advocate views I find personally abhorrent, whether they are political Islamists or officers justifying a coup.
Orhan Pamuk
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It is not my intention to explain Turkey, its culture and its problems. My literature has a universal concern: I want to bring people and their emotions closer to my readers, not explain Turkish politics.
Orhan Pamuk
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We had no desire to live in Istanbul, nor in Paris or New York. Let them have their discos and dollars, their skycrapers and supersonics transports. Let them have their radios and their color TV, hey, we have ours, don't we? But we have something they don't have. Heart. We have heart. Look, look how the light of life seeps into my very heart
Orhan Pamuk